USA TODAY International Edition
Disarm Islamism
I won’t give up my Islam to extremists
“The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helms, the minarets our bayonets, the believers our soldiers.”
This was the Islamist poem quoted by the mayor of Istanbul in 1997. Charged with using inflammatory speech, he was ejected from office and jailed. Today, that mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is prime minister of Turkey, and he’s pushing the secular nation, a NATO member, toward an unabashedly Islamist future.
As a Muslim, I refuse to give up Islam to the Islamists. So should others who believe in a pluralistic Islam. It is the only path to peaceful resolution of religious differences within Islam and with other faiths.
Yet today, pluralist manifestations of Islam are contracting. Never before has there been a time when Islam has been more threatened from within. That threat today is both ideological and sectarian.
Ideologically, Islamists preach intolerance. They seek power to make others conform to their rules. They are at war with moderate Muslims and people of other faiths.
At the same time, Islam is cleaving along ancient, sectarian lines. The two main branches of the faith, Sunni and Shiite, are separating and preparing for conflict: Physically, as in Iraq, where mixed neighborhoods are reorganizing as sectarian enclaves and psychologically, as Islamists on both sides stoke fear and isolation.
This is giving birth to an unprecedented age of conflict.
In Syria, Shia- linked Alawites face Sunni extremists in a war that has killed over 140,000. In Lebanon, car bombs threaten to reignite sectarianism. In Egypt, Islamists confront secular and mainstream Muslims.
In nuclear- armed Pakistan, Sunni Islamist policies legally persecute minorities. In the Northwest Frontier, the Pakistani Taliban execute vaccination workers, casting them as secularism’s soldiers. One result: Polio is again crippling children.
Islamists claim to manifest an official Islam, concealing totalitarian ideology behind a veil of faith. Though they can be violent or nonviolent, they wage war against secularization and seek to extinguish the few Christians in their midst. Tomorrow, Islamists will turn more of their hatred on non- Islamist Muslims.
Islamists are masters at manipulating the masses, preying on ignorance of Islam and pitching a populist narrative of virulently antiWestern, anti- Semitic, anti- secular propaganda to arouse the uneducated and silence the naive.
In the West, they are unwittingly aided by those who, fearful of inducing Islamophobia, try to suppress debate about the forces driving the radicalization of Islam.
This has contributed to a decade of American warfare waged with little regard for Islam’s sectarian divides.
The result is predictable. The Arab Awakening is on life support. Islamists seized the brief democratic opening that it created before institutions could be built to guarantee the pluralism democracy requires. Democracy will fail unless Islamism is castrated. Secular democracy, every Muslim’s best hope against Islamism, is everywhere on the retreat.
There is only one way to reverse this trend. Moderate Muslims have to realize that Islamism must be confronted, not tolerated. It must be disarmed from within the faith. Our confrontation with the beast starts by naming its origins truthfully as from within us.
If anti- Islamist Muslims do not rise to the challenge, one day we will find our mosques have become barracks, our minarets remade into bayonets, and our fellow believers no longer true Muslims but molded into Islamist soldiers.